Attributed to the Harrow Painter

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Pub Date 01 Nov 2017 | Archive Date 31 Oct 2017

Description

Attributed to the Harrow Painter reckons with fatherhood, the violence of nostalgia, poetry, and the commodity world of visual art as the poems here frantically cycle through responses to the speaker’s son’s remark on a painting by Julian Schnabel that it “looks like garbage.” What does it mean to be a minor artist, the poems wonder, like the Greek pot painter named in the book’s title, who is described by one critic as “indeed a minor talent, not withstanding the undeniable charm of some of his works”? What structures must be destroyed to clear the way for all the “minor” voices that litter the discourse of Western civilization? This is a mangled, tattered guide to transcendence through art in an age when such a thing seems nearly impossible.
Attributed to the Harrow Painter reckons with fatherhood, the violence of nostalgia, poetry, and the commodity world of visual art as the poems here frantically cycle through responses to the...

Advance Praise

“Meandering around the edges of the beginning of someone’s mid-life, Attributed to the Harrow Painter dips back to lost teenage friends, traumas, accommodations, pleasures and losses and forward as the father of a young child, to the inevitable future. There’s the New York diaspora, and there are the blue jays 
and backyards of skull-fuck cold Kansas. Where are you most alive? Like Dana Ward and Ariana Reines, Nick Twemlow writes brainy poetry that’s as dispersed as real life without losing heart. I found the book very moving, and will read it again.”—Chris Kraus, author, I Love Dick and Summer of Hate 

“Meandering around the edges of the beginning of someone’s mid-life, Attributed to the Harrow Painter dips back to lost teenage friends, traumas, accommodations, pleasures and losses and forward as...


Available Editions

EDITION Paperback
ISBN 9781609385415
PRICE $18.00 (USD)
PAGES 98

Average rating from 5 members


Featured Reviews

&don't worry so much
About whether they think
You're a boy or a girl.
You have much
To look forward to
In the matrix
Of gods and trends.

I have always thought preference for poetry is very strictly individual, this is true for all genres of literature, of course- it's just that to me poetry gives more freedom for interpretation of forms and compositions.

Is poetry the most elevated type of writing, or it's just "documenting " one's own oblivion; is the poet like the Harrow painter- "minor " , poorly equipped, just more than ordinarily competent, or actually a genius- honestly- I don't know... and that's what I like about verses.
Reading it doesn't always depend on your mood, or anything- sometimes a sentence just hits you and well...that's it.

With all that being said, and since each poem reading is a personal experience, I am not going to write an analysis about Nick Twemlow's poems. I'll say I liked the author's style, as I am very fond of stream of consciousness- this is my type of poetry and will share with you my favorite parts of the book :

This feeling we all
Know each other
From some past life
Spent holding hands
Walking over the precipice Into the volcanic bowels
Of Hell, this otherness, Fixed into a buried
Set of neurons native To homo sapiens sapiens, Has
surfaced surfaced With a fury,
Furious with spouts
Of pepper spray
Spraying the frozen air
Waiting for history's Next victim to occupy, Occupies
the space
In front of it.


I imagine
All my obsessions
Abstracting into a color, Sometimes
A version of blue,
Sometimes
I can't work it out,
I have such
An impoverished
Color palette
To work with, so I get
Caught up
In this, my inability to see Color in any interesting
way,&then
The whole thing falls
Apart& I am back
In here, where
The walls are pink
&the pixels
Laugh like dropised clowns.

As I smoked
&stared out between The slashes of frost
On the window,
Not thinking
So much as enduring This adolescence
Became a lesson
In how to wait
For nothing to happen.

So you
Tell me
How your
Radical formalism
Saves lives
Exactly?

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